A-to-Z Challenge: Kalinin

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A few days ago, I was playing around with one of childhood keepsakes, a Russian doll, that I got from one of my family trips as I was relaxing watching some cartoons with a group. I thought about the various layers people have as I took the dolls apart and put them back together again.

Fascinated by Russian culture and history, I decided to learn more about an influential Russian political leader and Bolshevik revolutionary by the name, Mikhail Kalinin.

Despite this quote by him above, on March 5, 1940, he and six other members of the Soviet Politburo signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries” kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus, part of the Katyn massacre.

He was a master of the house. From 1919 to 1946, he served as Head of State of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later, the Soviet Union. In 1926, he was a member of the Politburo, a supreme policy-making body, of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

For thousands of years humankind’s finest minds have been struggling with the theoretical problem of finding the forms that would give peoples the possibility, without the greatest of torment, without internecine strife, of living side by side in friendship and brotherhood. Practically speaking, the first step in this direction is only being taken now, today.